


Per Mare Per Terram

by winterlain



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Missing Scene, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 04:43:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20540312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterlain/pseuds/winterlain
Summary: Little sets out to rescue Crozier and finds himself at a strange impasse.





	Per Mare Per Terram

Why, thought Little, should his courage choose not for forsake him now?

His boot soles ground against the shale, lead shot clacking in his pockets, weighting them with their impotence. _All we have are our instincts and training_, he had reassured Hodgson, transferring the bullets to where they waited yet untouched, through fog and fear, monster and mutiny.

He wondered that his resolve should carry him thus, away from the boats and from camp, where it had failed to rouse even a single other man to action. What mad plan could he enact, walking alone into the devil’s maw? He possessed an abundance of shot and a dearth of time. Which life would he take if his aim did not falter before his own was inevitably forfeit? Hickey himself? Golding? Des Voeux? Tozer?

But then, Crozier would know what to do. Subdue the treacherous, unite a company parted three ways, tend the sick, and lead them to safety. Accomplishing any one of these, let alone all, seemed astronomically unlikely. _A big losing hand_, Tozer’s voice echoed. Was there anything left but, really?

Still, he tracked onwards. Fitzjames had once told a story at dinner about leaving _Euphrates_ carrying letters, walking from the wreckage of ambition to salvage his own purpose. Little tried to imagine what he had felt then; no doubt the relief of being untethered from his post on that disastrous mission had mingled with misgivings about spending the greater part of three years hauling unserviceable boat-parts overland, an uncanny parallel to their present undertakings. But James Fitzjames had been an optimist, charging ever onward to the next great adventure, to glory and redemption.

He thought of laying his commander and better to rest in the cradle of this place that had chewed them apart and ground them down, leaving in their wake a long smear of strange detritus, buttons and bookends, teeth and bones, and felt there would be meagre to salvage here. Being cut loose to govern his own destiny, he found, did not inspire within him an ounce of optimism. He felt unmoored and adrift, left finally alone with nothing but his indecision and ineptitude.

If only he had shot Des Voeux.

If only he had steeled his wits during the creature’s rampage.

If only he hadn’t opened the armoury.

And fainter, rose up the ghosts of older self-recriminations. If only he had raised the signal sooner when they had let fly the guns at Sidon, a miscalculation that had cost the lives of three men. Even so, Little had been decorated and awarded promotion alongside the other officers for a siege victorious and swift quelling of the Turkish fleet. When had he become a man so stymied by cowardice, or had it always been in his nature, only waiting for the critical opportunity to be found wanting?

To fail at sea meant crawling back, upright onto land and into drawing rooms, billeting in relatives’ spare quarters or in boarding houses, scrabbling for the next golden commission in Royal Naval letterhead. Fitzjames’ had found him at the end of a rest cure that had outlived its efficacy. Laid up in ordinary like a ghost vessel for eighteen months, he had passed his thirty-third birthday in godforsaken Blackpool of all places, wallowing in the revelation that there was no more maddening sensation than to be near the sea and not upon it.

The Discovery Service, it turned out, suited him quite well, with all the routine and structure of naval command less the dubious element of warfare. The first nights following the departure from Greenhithe, sleep found Little more assuredly than it had in two years. Even frozen into the pack, the eerie creaking and cracking of ice was at least more tolerable than the thunderous cannonades that he was loathe to admit had haunted his dreams.

Indeed, some of what could pass for happiness, or at least stability in the past few weeks he found in advancing the party southward; scouting the land’s lay, hitched to the sledges alongside the other men like trusty malamutes. A report to deliver, quarry to point and set, a hand to lick.

_To restore our best chance of survival, we must restore our captain_, by any means necessary even if none other believed in the conviction of his words.

***

His fingertips tingled as he circled counter-clockwise, north of the mutineers’ camp, convincing himself that he was drawing a bead in approaching with the element of surprise, and not merely tarrying. He brushed them against the musket balls in his pocket; they felt cold and uncomforting.

In the distance, farther away from the mark than even he was, a lone figure in grey canvas was stopped in its paces, appearing to contemplate the landscape into which it nearly blended. Even from where he stood, the bearing and gait of Sergeant Tozer were unmistakeable.

With a start Little realized, _he is heading towards the ships_.

They approached one another with an almost comical slowness across the naked plain, halting when they could see the other’s eyes. Neither man took up arms.

The same calm, defiant gaze that he had been unable to surmount just days prior challenged him again. There was something in that mix of wise and haughty and self-assured that crinkled about eyes that had never regarded him with deference, despite the trappings of rank and privilege that dressed their workaday language. His was a face that could assess a man’s measure in one easy sweep, at home radiating laughter and bonhomie in quayside public houses as it was at parade rest.

Little supposed it was the reason that for one treacherous moment he had allowed himself to weigh the mad consideration of disappearing after him into the fog, even with the false persuasion of releasing the guns fresh upon his mind. Never for the offensive abjurations of Hickey; he believed in Crozier absolute, but Tozer’s surety, especially at close quarters, was magnetic. He could (and had) disarmed Little without lifting even a finger.

“Edward.” The familiar nod and knowing half-smile. Even the shifting of Tozer’s rifle-strap to relax it partway off his wide shoulder played out like a parody of their previous encounter. Otherwise, he carried with him only a gunny sack. Just as Little knew his intentions, surely Tozer must have sized up his own.

What was there left to say, now that they met one another at the ends of the earth?

“Sergeant, if it’s the ships you are after, as I perceive it is, then please, help me to rescue Crozier so that we might see this through together, using our combined resources. We’ve so little left even between us now.”

“That’s a tall order, isn’t it?” An exhale, a raise of the eyebrows. Tozer fully unshouldered both gun and tow sack, dangling both from slumped arms, and glanced sidelong in the direction of the camp he had deserted. “Suppose you can guess why I’m out here by my lonesome, then tell yourself the answer to that question.”

To hear the folly of his plan stamped out with such unbrookable finality by the very man who could have given it hope blew through Little like an icy wind, leaving him feeling hollow and inexorably drained. Feebly, he tried again to reason, “Please…Solomon. Only you can do this.” The name felt strange in his mouth, a transgressive familiarity that he had been on the receiving end of, but would never otherwise dream of reciprocating.

His efforts begot him a genuine smile, Tozer’s –_Solomon’s_ – warm eyes scrunched endearingly into the lines of laughter that carved the broad planes of his face. Even here, bedraggled and unshaven, he was still rakishly handsome, the ruddy burn of sun and wind giving him an air of rugged good cheer. Little became suddenly and absurdly self-conscious of his own haggard appearance.

“Look, I’m not even sure why I came out here at all, and I’m thinking you reckon the same.” No matter the hand, Tozer somehow managed to have his card every time. Little opened his mouth to speak but the protest died upon his lips when he saw the expression on Tozer’s face. It was a mirror to his own; lost, masterless.

“Tell you what’s going to happen, Edward. I’m going to pace out here for a spell, thinking about whether or not to hedge all my bets on making the damn ships, and then I’m going to turn around, and go back to goddamn Hickey and his mad fucking god-knows-what-the-hell plan.” He dropped to a crouch, massaged both temples with his fingertips. When the shaking in his shoulders subsided, he turned a wry gaze upwards at Little.

“And you, you’re going to think too much about how to pull off this one-man Apache mission of yours, trying to make yourself feel brave or lucky enough until you realize that it’s never going to happen, and then you’ll turn around and go back too.” Little would have felt even worse about this damnably candid and accurate pronouncement if Tozer hadn’t assessed his own state of matters first. For the first time, he regarded the marine – soldier – man, with something that verged on pity or perhaps empathy. It was difficult to distinguish the two any longer.

Shifting his boots, Little crouched onto the slipping shales beside Tozer, who continued to squat with his arms resting about his knees, the latter’s face having resumed its usual poised mask as he stared off into the middle distance. “And that’s it then, Solomon? Is that what you've decided? That you don’t have it in you to try and face down…whatever is left to us on your own terms?” Even as the words left him, he knew they lacked the compunction to shift anything within either of them.

The gravity of their mutual damnation settled heavily around them, two animals too lame or too tame to slip the muzzle, even as the hand led them unto execution. Caught in the last vestiges of a bounded liberty, neither man could find the urgency to hasten towards his own inevitable and unhappy reckoning. Little knew in that moment that Tozer understood perfectly the turbulence of hope and frustration, of yearning desperation turned to miserable resignation that churned within him.

“You can stay here a while if you want," Tozer offered thinly. "We can just, I don’t know…pretend none of this is even happening right now.” It was an appealing idea, a small reprieve to suspend time for just a moment and affect a ludicrous imitation of autonomy, as of a man combing his hair before mounting the gallows.

It was also utterly, unthinkably absurd.

The full, wild grin that spread across Solomon’s face was infectious, the like of which Edward hadn’t seen since regarding him coolly in passing amidships, just another roughhousing redcoat spinning licentious yarns for his messmates. Now, both men doubled over into crazy, raucous, uncontrollable laughter, the pain of which was the only thing they had left to hold fast to.

***

They shared the last of Solomon’s tobacco, their smoke rings puffing into the waning Arctic sunlight, and when Edward began to shiver, Solomon’s arms encircled him, impossibly steady and warm.

Large, sturdy hands rubbed up Edward’s belly and chest beneath his waistcoat, finding the stiff peaks of his nipples through his shirtsleeves. Solomon’s breaths steamed in hot rasps over his nape and earlobes, leaving a trail of cooling droplets on Edward’s skin where he tilted his chin to lick a stripe below the line of Edward’s whiskers, and then upwards into his mouth.

That he was here, in the middle of the barren tundra, sitting in Solomon Tozer’s lap and shamelessly grinding onto Solomon’s burgeoning erection while having his own prick worked roughly through his trousers was as surreal as any of the rest of this entire horrific ordeal had been, Edward supposed. Some detached yet perfectly lucid part of him thought that perhaps this had been the very thing he had wanted all along, this imperfect, inviolable submission, if only to another stray.

Finally, with Solomon’s bare cock thrusting along the cleft of his arse, Solomon’s thick fingers working the steady, slick dribble from him, Edward found himself utterly ensconced in the primal headiness of their joining, the heavy scent of their bodies on the sharp, cold air. He was unbelievably aroused but thought it impossible for his wracked body to spend. Then Solomon’s palm curled around his throat, thumb and fingers squeezing in deftly until sparks erupted behind Edward’s eyes.

He fell down, down into the loveliest of darknesses.

The last thing he knew was Solomon’s voice saying, _Farewell, Edward_.

***

He awoke to twilight. The world was stained rose fading to violet and indigo, the basin of endless luminous stones spreading forever outwards. He could have been at the bottom of the sea.

The cold and the pain set in all at once, the sting of his lungs sending him into fits of coughing. He brushed the frost from his beard and hair.

His coat had been draped over him as he slept and he hastened to dress himself, fingers trembling clumsily against the buttonholes. He balled his hands into the pockets. All of the bullets were gone. All except the one in the Baker rifle, a deliberate mercy.

How much time had he lost? He supposed it mattered little now.

With great effort he stood, fighting the protest of every bone and tendon, lurching into the frenetic dance of a man reclaiming his extremities. He would check later for permanent damage. For now, he would move.

He had been given a parting gift; the deprivation of his final and utmost will, a choice made for him.

He tracked south.

He would live.

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive my hastily cobbled research if I have been incorrect upon any points!
> 
> Shyly dedicated to the three of you that made this pairing a Thing. <3
> 
> 2019-09-08 Added some edits for style and transition. I clearly posted this in a hurry, hope it reads slightly better now!


End file.
